New York Stilled Life – A Portrait of a City in Lockdown

In March, 2020, Gregory J. Peterson had a party in his apartment for two friends who had just arrived in New York City. They had traveled through Italy and told horrific stories about a country that was in a severe lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19. What was happening in Italy, China, and other countries seemed far away. A short time later, however, the pandemic reached our shores, and New York City, designated as America’s number one hot spot, shut down.

While most New Yorkers stayed indoors, Peterson, undaunted, ventured out, riding his bicycle around the city. What he discovered was a New York deserted, devoid of the teaming crowds and traffic that usually defined the city’s life. Armed only with only his iPhone 11 Pro, he took photos and posted them on Facebook. Moved by the photos, people encouraged Peterson to publish a book. New York Stilled Life – A Portrait of a City in Lockdown, published by GOFF Books on February 1, is now in its second printing and is being sold at the Museum of Modern Art and online.

One Liberty Plaza and Isamu Noguchi Sculpture – May 14, 2020, 4:43 p.m.

“The reaction so far has been beyond my wildest dreams,” Peterson says. “I have received fan mail from strangers. There has been interest in a photo series by a major museum.” On  Amazon, the book has been consistently named a number one new release in street photography, city photography, and individual photography. “It’s quite phenomenal,” Peterson says. “I’ve never had the ambition to be a photographer, yet this happened.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Peterson was perhaps destined to chronicle what was happening in his city. Born in Harlem, he attended public school in Queens, graduated from Columbia Law School, and worked for thirteen years at Rockefeller Center. He has a deep love for the city and an intimate knowledge of its iconic landmarks. His photos elicit a range of emotions. There’s shock that the world’s best known city could be brought to a screeching halt by a virus. The empty landscapes evoke a sadness, not only for all those days, weeks, and months that New Yorkers sheltered inside, but also for all the lives that were lost, all the people who will never return to enjoy the city. Yet, the photos also capture New York’s beauty. One person who commented about Peterson’s photos said it best: “Devoid of people, these views reveal a serene beauty most often obscured by the frenzy of our fast-paced lives.”

Sheep Meadow, Central Park – April 30, 2020, 3:32 p.m.

On his first outing after the shutdown, Peterson took a walk in his neighborhood, coming upon Lincoln Center at twilight. “How many hundreds of times had I been there?” he writes in the preface to the book. “There was always someone on the plaza, a big crowd before a performance, a bevy of ballerinas off to a rehearsal, tourists taking selfies, dog walkers, ticket scalpers, guards, always someone. Now, no one.”

United Nations – May 7, 2020, 3:18 p.m.

That evening, Peterson realized what he was seeing was historic. The next day he took his bike to Rockefeller Center. “When I was a member of the NBC law department, my 10th floor office looked out directly over the star of the legendary annual Christmas tree,” he writes. “I’ve seen the plaza at all times of the day and night and in every season of the year,  but I never dreamt I would see it like this – at 6 p.m., normally the height of rush hour – deserted.”

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine – Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020, 3:29 p.m.

Peterson encountered the same situation no matter where he biked – the United Nations, where no flags were flying, Easter Sunday at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, with not a soul in the pews, the Bethesda Fountain, with no water spraying, the storied shops on Fifth Avenue closed, and the Apollo Theater, its marquee with the words, “Be Well.”

Winter Garden – Brookfield Place, April 14, 2020, 2:10 p.m.

In the book’s foreword, “Empty Stages: A Short History of Urban Photography Absent People,” Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, notes that humans were often left out of photographs, either because of limits in technology, like in early daguerreotypes, or intentionally, to focus on landscapes or architecture. The situation Peterson encountered was unique. “Avoiding contagion by riding his bike around the emptied streets of the boroughs of the city from the Upper West Side into the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens,” Bergdoll writes, “Peterson took vivid color photographs of an abandoned city; a modern day Pompeii stilled not by the fiery ash-filled cataclysm of volcanic eruption but by the transmission of a deadly virus moving invisibly through the atmosphere.”

The book includes 125 of the 400 photos Peterson shot over several months. “Each one continues to have an effect on me as it still is so surreal that the city could be experienced in this way, that it is just you alone with the city itself,” he says. “The book has been a labor of love which I intend to stand as a testament to the beauty of the city, the brilliance of the architects and city planners who have built it, the stamina and resilience of New Yorkers surviving the pandemic, and as a souvenir of a surreal interlude that all New Yorkers experienced, and that people around the world can all identify with.”

Despite the success of the book, Peterson says he is not planning any other photography projects. “This was a once in a lifetime experience I was lucky enough to be able to document,” he says. “I kind of hope nothing this extraordinary happens again in my lifetime.”

New York Stilled Life – A Portrait of a City in Lockdown
Gregory J. Peterson

Top photo: Grand Central Terminal and East 42nd Street, looking west, May 9, 2020, 6:31 a.m.
All photos by Gregory J. Peterson

Used with permission from the author